THE slow decline of marriage is upending American politics. In the 2012 presidential election, unmarried women accounted for nearly a quarter of all votes cast. Their votes went decisively to Barack Obama, by 36 percentage points.

You might not think that a group that runs from not-yet-married college students to inner-city single mothers and divorced professionals had much in common. Yet unmarried women are spectacularly loyal to the Democrats—if they vote, which many do not. (Widows are outliers, voting more like married women.)

My graphs group widows/widowers with the married under the logic that widowhood is an inevitable byproduct of marriage.

The “marriage gap” dwarfs the sex gap, by which women as a whole have long favoured Democrats: Mr Obama beat Mitt Romney by a less dramatic 11 points among female voters.

There are minor differences between my graphs and the numbers The Economist reports because my graphs use the larger Reuters-Ipsos American Mosaic national online panel of 40,000 voters compared to The Economist's use of the exit poll of 25,000, which didn't invest in having adequate coverage in 20 states it considered uninteresting, such as giant Texas. But, the two big polls were in general agreement.

Like boffins squabbling about quantum physics, some political types wonder whether “unmarried women” amount to a discrete voter block at all, or whether the label merely sweeps up various left-leaning slices of the electorate: ie, younger voters, poorer ones, more secular Americans and non-whites. That would be no more than an interesting metaphysical question, but for three big and inter-related developments.

First, unmarried women are one of America’s fastest-growing groups, leaping from 45m in 2000 to around 53m today—making them, in theory, a larger block of eligible voters than blacks and Hispanics put together (though in reality the groups overlap).

Indeed.

Second, Democrats—notably the Obama crowd—have found ways to map the electorate with unprecedented precision, using everything from polls and doorstep canvassing to commercial consumer databases. In the Dark Ages (ie, before 2008), campaigns might have blanketed majority-black city blocks or mostly-Democratic neighbourhoods with appeals to register and vote, while saturating the airwaves with paid advertising. That wasted time and money on those who always vote anyway, those who never vote, and those who (gasp) might vote Republican. Now the talk is of target “universes”: focusing resources on those who need just a nudge to come out and vote the right way.

It turns out that two principal campaign tasks—persuading swing voters, and turning out loyal but sporadic supporters—are made far more efficient if marital status is added to the mix, alongside such markers as sex, race, income and geography. That holds equally true when buying advertising alongside the right TV shows, and when leafleting selected homes in specific streets. Nationally, Page Gardner, a voter-registration expert, has crafted models that allow unmarried women to be found with great accuracy. Conservatives are still playing catch-up.

In November’s election for governor of Virginia—a race won narrowly by Terry McAuliffe, a Democratic fundraiser and member of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s inner circle—fully two-thirds of voters chosen for special attention by Democratic get-out-the-vote teams were unmarried women, says Michael Halle, a McAuliffe campaign guru. Unmarried women voted for Mr McAuliffe by a thumping 42 percentage-point margin over his Republican rival, Ken Cuccinelli, arguably handing him victory. (Married women backed Mr Cuccinelli by nine points.)

For an explanation, consider a third big development: the Republicans’ embrace of policies and slogans that might have been laboratory-crafted to upset and unite different types of unmarried women. ...

A more accurate way of thinking about this is that the Democrats know that they can trawl online through the public utterances of hundreds of miscellaneous Republican candidates nationwide, then sic their pet national news media outlets to carpet bombing the public with an orchestrated campaign of umbrage over what some Republican somewhere said.

Pragmatic Republicans know the party needs to tone down its social conservatism. But even so, it may struggle with singletons. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, says single women of differing races, ages, classes and religiosity are united by a sense of fending for themselves. That makes them more likely to favour a strong role for government as a safety net.

"Fending for themselves" < > "strong role for government as a safety net," but never mind logic.

I bring up this article to show how hard it is for anybody to step outside the dominant Who? Whom? Narrative of our times in which vast exercises in power are used to redefine their beneficiaries as the sainted Powerless.

The GOP's marriage gap is 77% as large among men as among women, which suggests the GOP's problem is less women than singleness. But, practically nobody notices that because everybody is so inculcated in thinking in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys.

Single women are, by Narrative definition, Good Guys.

Single men are ... well, ambiguous at best. They are men, so they are by that definition by Bad Guys. Their singleness could be spun either way, but mostly there are a lot of single ladies out there who want single men to put a ring on it. On the other hand, single men do vote strongly for Obama. It's a puzzlement, so it's best just to completely ignore single men because they don't fit conveniently into Narrative categories of Good v. Bad.

Moreover, the policy recommendations that flow from these perspectives (the GOP's problem is single women versus the GOP's problem is single people) are opposite. The Economist, representing the dominant mindset, thinks the GOP should strive harder to make single motherhood even more socially acceptable than it is now, which, presumably, would lead to even more single women. But they are natural Republicans. Oh, except they are not.

My suggestion, in contrast, is that the GOP should finally notice that it's time to try policies for making marriage more affordable.

30 comments:

Anonymous
said...

My suggestion, in contrast, is that the GOP should finally notice that it's time to try policies for making marriage more affordable.

It's too late. The cat's out of the bag. The train has left the station. At this point, the only way the GOP could make marriage affordable is by turning the country into a sexist, patriarchal theocracy. Ultimately, sexist religion is the only way you can make marriage affordable. Of course, trying to do that would just play right into the Democrats' hands, since the Dems have always been scaring and warning people that the GOP wants to turn the country into a sexist, patriarchal theocracy.

The thing that conservatives really need to focus on is the media/message gap. Conservatives are outgunned in the media, academia, arts, culture, and entertainment by a factor of 10 to 1 or worse. And even most of what passes as 'conservatism' is really Liberalism Inc that just happens to be 10 or 20 yrs behind.

Focusing on Marriage Gap is weak because it's about unconscious conservatism. Women who get married and raise kids become more conservative emotionally. But they are still without clear conservative ideas and values, and therefore fail to raise their kids with proper conservative values.

Focusing on the Marriage Gap means that conservatism should just wait for the biological clock to do its work: maybe single Liberal women will get married and become more conservative. This approach is passive and defensive. It's like placing a static net in the water and waiting fish to swim into it. A truly effective way to fish is to drag the net across the water. A moving widening net tries to win over the hearts and minds through the media, academia, and entertainment.

For conservatism to have real power, it has to be aggressive and get its ideas across. Instead of hoping that married women will vote Republican, it has to make single women wanna get married in the first place and see the advantage of conservatism. But to do this, it also has to make boys wanna grow into men and carry the load as fathers and husbands, something many males are not willing to do.

Conservatism must also be unit-ist. The problem of individualism is it atomizes conservatives into self-interested characters. The problem of feminism is it seeks power only as women. A feminist wife is a pathetic creature who thinks more in terms of 'my woman power' than in terms of 'my family power'.

The natural organization of power for most people is the unit. The individual is too alone. The collective--class, women, men, Christians, etc.--is too broad(made up mostly of strangers). But a unit, especially the family, is where the power of the man and power of the woman come together to produce new life and more power. A husband who thinks in terms of male power and a wife who thinks in terms of female power are both missing the point. The real power is within the unit where male power and female power come together to form a new chemistry, a new unit power. It's like electricity is when + and - meet. It makes little sense to speak of electricity as only - power or only + power.

Family is the unit in which the male power and female power unite to form a new kind of power that transcends narrow notions of male power or female power.

I might be able to explain the single men thing in my own small social circle (minimum college educated, some ivy leaguers, some doctors/lawyers, finance types)...

the guys in my social circle that make over 150k (25-34) are married.

the ones making under that are not.

Steve is wrong in saying there are lots of single women out there wanting the single guys to put a ring on it. The single women all want about 10% of the guys to put a ring on it.

I think single guys are voting for D's for some of the same reasons single F's are in general, but at a lower rate naturally as M's in general vote for D's at a lower rate overall and I would say you have a higher proportion of 250k+ earners that are single guys (compared t single women that make that) who vote R on economics.

Single women belong, many of them, to the growing class of parasites who live on handouts from the government--that is to say, on the fruits of other people's labor.

A party platform of conservative positions will never appeal to the parasite class, and Republicans should not seek to please them: it can only demoralize their base. But maybe if they were to take a page from the Democratic playbook and demonize the parasites, it might energize the base and turn it out come election time.

Another way to think about this is that it's inevitable: The country WILL move toward a bigger welfare state to reflect the increasingly harem-like nature of the sexual marketplace. All men will work and put funds into the general kitty (government), while a smaller portion of men will impregnate all the women.

I see no way around this. If you're a woman, would you rather have one shot of quarterback sperm and a government check for life or a steady diet of regular-guy sperm and reliance on regular-guy's pay as a shelf-stocker at Target?

Regarding single men voting Democrat. This is too vague. Democrat for the Presidential election, Senate, congress, mayoral, town selectman? I assume you mean Presidential. Well that may be true for the last two cycles but remember Bush? The two disastrous wars? I think at this point everyone is sour on Iraq and Afstan, and that hurt the Republicans, (as it should have) among men.

Steve - just tell your readers this - generally speaking, winners get happily married, losers don't.Abortion is an eight letter word but it has more continuing charm for the losers in this world than the 7 letter word Beatles had for preteen girls without real love in their lives in the long gone days of 1964, many of whom by the way would rather now listen to Mozart, the Carpenters, even Taylor Swift. Understand these two not very complicated facts, make an attempt to understand which politicians appeal to winners and which to losers, try and figure out the winner/loser ratio in this country, and you will be way better at political analysis than most of the educated individuals who believe that they are on top their game at genuine political analysis.

Funny how no one ever writes an article titled, "Democrats should worry that married people shun them." After all, most people still think of marriage as a good thing, and married people as responsible citizens. Shouldn't it concern Democrats that such people don't trust them?

My own childhood (approximately 1958-1966) coincided with the last years when the overwhelming majority of adults were married and the overwhelming majority of children had two parents at home. Now, because of the supervisory nature of my job, I interact with twenty-somethings on a regular basis. Marriage is now a class marker -- a strong class marker. It really is close to the winners and losers dichotomy that other posters describe.

Funny how no one ever writes an article titled, "Democrats should worry that married people shun them." After all, most people still think of marriage as a good thing, and married people as responsible citizens. Shouldn't it concern Democrats that such people don't trust them?

The marriage gap is the measure of the political inclinations of adults vs. overgrown children.

Open borders = death of America (bad) and the death of the GOP (at long last). This gap, that gap, the only gap that matters is the race gap. In a decade or two voting Republican will be as much a protest vote as voting libertarian or green. Schadenfreude can be beautiful.

"The marriage gap is the measure of the political inclinations of adults vs. overgrown children."

In all seriousness, what would happen if the voting age were to be raised to about 25? (Doesn't recent work suggest the brain keeps growing/pruning until about then?) Maybe reducing the voting age to 18 really was just a big mistake?

(Of course this will never happen, the modern Western welfare state has a lot of "gambler's ruin" lines, that once crossed are probably not reversible.)

You've gotta love that passive voice. The Democrats, helped along as usual by the idiotic libertarians, have been waging all out war on marriage for decades. But let's pretend it's just something which is happening naturally, like the weather.

Funny how no one ever writes an article titled, "Democrats should worry that married people shun them." After all, most people still think of marriage as a good thing, and married people as responsible citizens. Shouldn't it concern Democrats that such people don't trust them?

Ditto for never mentioning that the democrats are not appealing to men, whites, small business owners or Christians. It used to be married folk and the above were the rock of the nation.

On more than a few occasions I've seen the phrase 'married to the state' bandied about to describe the condition of single motherhood. A rather apt description, since the state, (or more honestly the taxpayer), plays the part of the provider, the protector and the paternal. Hence the Democrats - who favor the dominance of the government - will clean up. It's an interesting commentary on modern times that this type of socilaist absolutism - in which wealth is transferred ' to according to need and from ability' has succeeded far more and has become engrained in the warp and weft of American life far more than the most radical ideas of the aerliest of the Soviet post revolution communists ever did.A concept that would have been regarded with shuddering horror 100 year ago ie the 'state' sticking its tentacles into the minuteset and most personal aspects of free, individual life, is now regarded not only as the new norm but a 'good'.

As long as marriage is still affordable for the elites, Republicans dont care a rat´s ass what happens to the middle-class. Remember, their job is to screw the middle class. Does it make sense to destroy your voting base? it does if you´re planning ahead or you´re in it for the shot term. It pays well to betray your base, and it improves your social and economic status. Just ask Rubio, Bush Jr., etc, how well they´re doing.

acra"I see no way around this. If you're a woman, would you rather have one shot of quarterback sperm and a government check for life or a steady diet of regular-guy sperm and reliance on regular-guy's pay as a shelf-stocker at Target?"

There are a couple ways around this if you think it's too late to roll back the welfare state or do any of the things Steve has suggested be done at the political level. Method one: the regular guy can do as little work as possible and avoid becoming involved with women. There won't be any excess income to tax away and you can just relax and enjoy the extra leisure time. I think this is already happening because a smaller percentage of age 25-54 males are working full time jobs than ever before and you can see tax revenues falling and government budget deficits widening. Method two: if you do want female attention, realize that offering to be the provider male is a waste of time when the welfare state is available and refocus your efforts on improving your looks and personality. Both of these methods involve doing things at an individual instead of political level and there's nothing single women can do to stop them. It's happening right now.

again the suggestion that the democrats won in 2012 in part due to superior technological ability, yet obama can't even deliver a website with 3 years of lead time. it can't be both ways. are the democrats technologically (and by technologically, they mean intellectually) superior, or aren't they?

it could be the case that the democrats are good at one thing: winning elections by any means necessary. once they've won however, they have no idea how to do anything, since modern democrat politicians at the national level are not do-ers by any means. in contrast to democrat politicians in america's past, almost all of the democrats today are do nothing lawyers and career politicians. they're bureaucrats and their best skill set is figuring out how to tax stuff, not how to make anything work.

"Pragmatic Republicans know the party needs to tone down its social conservatism."

yeah, republicans need to tone down ideas like getting married and staying married. that's stupid. we're all so much better off if every human in the US is created by a single mother and raised by a single mother.

well, that's better for democrats, anyway.

yet again: once most social issues flip from conservative to liberal, the republican party becomes extinct. this flipping affects everything, not just social issues. the nation must necessarily become economically liberal. the rate of economic growth must decrease, and the rate of debt creation must increase. conservative ideas about money are totally rejected in a socially liberal nation. as we can plainly see from US politics in the last year. it becomes impossible to have a budget, or even to not increase spending.

the reverse situation is not possible. there is no such thing as socially liberal but fiscally conservative. socially liberal = decline in all phases and aspects of nationhood. socially liberal even means a decline in the size of the middle class, not that liberals would ever acknowledge this, or even put two and two together.

I'm sure the GOP has it figured out already. This problem can be fixed by gutting public schools, eliminating Social Security, and giving gargantuan tax breaks to plutocrats. I'm sure the GOP has some valuable insights into the mind of married women - the elimination of social services and the safety net is, after all, the number one priority for every mother I know.

Oops, in reality, good public schools are actually the number one priority of almost every mother I know.

The real mystery is not why the Democrats do relatively poorly among married people, it's why so many married people are so thoroughly conned every two or four years into voting for the GOP. What magic power do they have, that this group of lying plutocratic thieves can spend the last 70 years shitting all over us and doing their level best to permanently end the middle class.

"Pragmatic Republicans know the party needs to tone down its social conservatism."

Statements of this genre (Republicans need to tone down...) are often both true and false.

One way of looking at the problem of the GOP is that it is substantively non-conservative but rhetorically shrill.

Ideally, the GOP would be quite conservative on social and other issues but would spurn some of the combative rhetoric. The more genuinely populist and conservative the party is, the more necessary and desirable it is to cultivate a tweedy intellectual affect that can't be characterized as boorish.

The Economist, representing the dominant mindset, thinks the GOP should strive harder to make single motherhood even more socially acceptable than it is now, which, presumably, would lead to even more single women. But they are natural Republicans. Oh, except they are not.

Conventional wisdom about the GOP's future seems to generally take the form of a Chinese finger trap: give [demographic group] more power and votes because you aren't popular with [demographic group].

"Focusing on the Marriage Gap means that conservatism should just wait for the biological clock to do its work: maybe single Liberal women will get married and become more conservative. This approach is passive and defensive. It's like placing a static net in the water and waiting fish to swim into it. A truly effective way to fish is to drag the net across the water. A moving widening net tries to win over the hearts and minds through the media, academia, and entertainment. "

Nah, you got it all wrong. You need to boil the frog slowly, like the left has done since the '60s. Conservatives are always reactive, never proactive. I've realized that we have to adopt the left's tactics, which are (1) recruit more of your base and (2) reward your base.

You recruit more of your base by doing things like explicit favors to the married, since married vote Republican. Make it, as Steve says, more affordable to get married, with tax credits and the like. More will get married, and more will vote Republican.

If more get married, Dems will worry about losing married voters, and they will have to adopt some more conservative stances. Republicans can hammer them for being anti-marriage. More conservative pro-family policies will result.

Most women are not partisan. They go with whims and emotions, and who they perceive to be the winners. We need to win to beget more wins.

One final note - I think we have a better chance to improve among single men than among single women. Democrats are officially the anti-male party in the legislation they support, which makes it truly unbelievable that they get 59% of single men. But of course, single men have to be given a REASON to vote Republican, which will require Republicans to actually sell policies designed to help them.

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